Sunday, December 25, 2011

Local
Exterminations: Chelmno, Serbia and Reich Jews in RK Ostland

The
central decision-making process described above took place against a backdrop
in which local officials were pressing for permission to kill Jews who had been
deported into their regions. When consent to kill these Jews was granted, it
made the subsequent Europe-wide ‘decision’ all the more certain, because a
precedent had already been set for killing Jews who had been deported into
spaces that were unable or unwilling to permanently accommodate them.

Pressures to kill Jews locally had
already been anticipated in the centre, and the centre’s acknowledgment
indicates the degree of common thinking that existed between central and local
players. On September 2, 1941, Höppner (a close associate of the senior Warthegau
figures Greiser and Koppe) wrote to Eichmann that it was “essential ... that total
clarity prevails about what finally shall happen to those undesirable ethnic
elements deported from the greater German resettlement area. Is it the
goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be
totally eradicated?”[140]Höppner
was aware that deportation could mean death and was therefore seeking
clarification. The ensuing months would answer his query.

Decision-making to gas Jews at
Chelmno was preceded by arguments over overcrowding in the Lodz ghetto that
resulted from deportation. On October 4, 1941, Uebelhoer
forwarded a protest to Himmler, written by Hans Biebow, that “were the ghetto a pure
decimation ghetto, then one could contemplate a pure concentration of Jews.” Himmler’s response was that the author “did not appear to be an
old national socialist”[141], and on October 15, a further 20,000 Jews and 5,000 gypsies
were sent to Lodz, thereby making the “decimation ghetto”[142] a greater reality. Gassing was agreed between Greiser, Koppe
and Himmler as a solution to this problem because it resulted in decimation by
quicker means.[143] The centre [Himmler] was thus responding to local initiative
and protest, a pattern that was repeated in the Ostland and Serbia. Moreover,
this did not require Hitler’s personal intervention because Hitler had already
told Greiser that he could use his own discretion in choosing how he dealt with
the Jewish problem.[144]

The gassing of Jews at Chelmno was
preceded in 1940 by the use of gas vans employing bottled CO in the Warthegau
and at Soldau, East Prussia, run by Otto Rasch.[145] The
main unit using gas vans in the Warthegau was SK Lange, which was assigned to
HSSPF Koppe for “special tasks”. In the spring of 1940, Koppe loaned the unit
to Rediess, the HSSPF for East Prussia, to gas mental patients in Soldau:

[The] so-called Sonderkommando Lange,
assigned to me for special tasks, was detached to Soldau in East Prussia from
21 May to 8 June, 1940, as per agreement with the Reich Main Security Office
[RSHA]. During this period, it successfully evacuated 1,558 mental patients
from the Soldau transit camp.[146]

Koppe referred to Soldau as a
‘transit camp’ because, in that period, it was also used to forcibly resettle
Jews from western Polish towns such as Plock into the General Government.[147] However,
the use of the obvious euphemism ‘evacuated’ to mean killed suggests that
Soldau may have set a precedent for referring to death camps as transit camps,
which was later applied to Sobibor.[148] A
letter from Rediess to Wolff on November 7, 1941, revealed that 250-300 “insane
persons (Poles) from the area of Zichenau” were added to this operation.[149] This letter also had a marginal note,
handwritten by Brack, stating that Lange had received an advance payment from
Rasch. A later letter in this correspondence had a handwritten note on top,
“Tel. with Obf. Brack.”[150]

In August 1941, after Himmler's visit to a
shooting site, Bach-Zelewski had asked Koppe to send Lange
to meet him in Minsk.[151] In October 1941, Koppe forwarded a request to Himmler from Army
High Command that Lange, five subordinates and the gas van be sent to Novgorod
to kill 100 Russians suffering from dysentery because the army needed the
hospital for its own quarters.[152] In late November, Jews from the Bornhagen labour camp were
gassed.[153] The initiative to gas the Warthegau Jews at Chelmno came from
close co-operation between Koppe and his Gauletier, Arthur Greiser. The latter
wrote to Himmler on October 28, 1941, referring to "the agreement
reached between us."[154] On May 1, 1942, he wrote again and referred to the initial gassing
request:

It will be possible to conclude the action
of special treatment of about 100,000 Jews in the area of my Gau, authorized by
yourself with the agreement of the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, within the next 2-3 months.[155]

Greiser’s
figure of 100,000 is close to that given in a letter by Willy Just to Walter Rauff[156] on June
5, 1942, suggesting improvements to the vans. Just noted that since “December
1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed, using three vans, without any
defects showing up in the vehicles.”[157]In one of his interviews with Sassen, recorded when he was a
free man in Argentina, Eichmann stated that “Later in that same winter
[1941] Müller sent me to watch Jews being gassed in the Litzmannstadt area of
central Poland.”[158]

The gassings in the Warthegau have
three important implications for Nazi decision-making that are simply not
comprehended by Mattogno. Firstly, the gassings did not require an order;
Greiser clearly refers instead to the gassings being “authorized by yourself
with the agreement of the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,
SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich.” Secondly, permission to
gas 100,000 Jews locally could be given without that action requiring a general
policy having already been decided to exterminate all Europe’s Jews. Thirdly,
the progression from such local killings to a Europe-wide killing program did
not involve a massive moral and political leap: the moral boundary had already
been crossed long before the full program was authorized and implemented.
Fourthly, the technical means to gas these Jews had been evolved, in
co-operation with the KTI, in response to practical local problems in Serbia,
the Ostland and the Warthegau, and such evolution did not require a master plan
but simply a shared problem-solving bureaucracy that operated from the
assumption that Jewish lives were expendable.

Extermination in Serbia escalated
from shooting reprisals in the autumn of 1941 to the use of gas vans in the
spring of 1942, the latter coinciding with the use of gas vans at Chelmno and
at Maly Trostinets. In mid-August, 1941, Harald Turner, the chief of military
administration in Serbia requested (via Benzler) that all Jews be deported down
the Danube to Rumania or the General Government. This request was declined, but
a month later, Turner persuaded Benzler to make an appeal to Rademacher,
requesting deportation of the Jews to Poland or the USSR. Rademacher recorded
the reply that he received in a handwritten note that was subsequently
presented in evidence at the Eichmann trial:

In the opinion of Sturmbannführer Eichmann,
RSHA IVD4, there is no possibility to take them to Russia or to the
Generalgouvernement. Even Jews from Germany cannot be accommodated there.
Eichmann proposes to kill them by shooting.[159]

In the meantime, the Wehrmacht,
under the command of Böhme, began to shoot Jews under the pretext of the need
to fill 1:100 reprisal quotas. Such reprisals were not, however, for crimes
committed by Jews but were instead inflicted on Jews in lieu of Serb partisans
who had not been captured in sufficient numbers to meet the quotas. Turner
admitted that this was morally wrong in a private letter dated October 17, 1941,
sent to Hildebrandt:

In the last 8 days, I have had 2,000 Jews
and 200 Gypsies shot dead, following the quota of 1:100 for brutally murdered
German soldiers, and a further 2,200, also nearly all Jews, will be shot in the
next 8 days. That is not pleasant work! But it must be done, in order to make
it clear to people what it means to attack a German soldier, while at the same
time, the Jewish question solves itself most quickly in this way. Actually, it
is wrong, if taken literally, that for murdered Germans, for whom the ratio of
1:100 should come at the expense of the Serbs, 100 Jews will now be shot, but
they are the ones we happened to have in the camp...[160]

On October 26, Turner ordered that
“Jews and Gypsies” were “a danger to public order and safety” and that all male
Jews and Gypsies would therefore be put “at the disposal of the troops as
hostages.”[161]
The background to Turner's order was a meeting on October 20 in Belgrade
between Turner, Rademacher, Suhr and Fuchs, in which it was decided that male
Jews would be held as hostages and gradually killed to meet reprisal quotas
against Serb (non-Jew) partisans, whilst evacuation of women & children 'to
the East' was agreed for a future unspecified date. However, this evacuation
did not take the form of expulsion, but instead took the form of gas vans the
following spring, which Turner falsely claimed credit for in his letter to
Wolff:

Already some months ago, I shot dead all the
Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women
and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a
"delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought
about the definitive clearing out of the camp, which in any event since the
arrival of Meyssner and the turning over of this camp to him, was continued by
him. Then the time is come in which the Jewish officers to be found in prisoner
of war camps under the Geneva Convention find out against our will about their
no longer existing kinfolk and that could easily lead to complications.[162]

Turner admitted that ‘Entlausungswagen’
was a euphemism for gas van by placing the term in inverted commas.[163] The
gas van had been ordered direct from Berlin by the head of the Security Police in
Belgrade, Emanuel Schäfer,
who admitted this in his West German postwar trial testimony at both his trial
in Cologne[164]
and Pradel's trial in Hannover. After the gassings, Schäfer reported back to Berlin noting
that the two drivers of the "special Saurer truck", Götz and Meyer,
"had carried out their special task."[165]Army
records cited in the Schäfer trial judgment show that the victims were women and
children.[166]Serbia therefore illustrates how a reprisal mentality that had racial
targets could escalate into a policy of gassing racial groups.

Decision-making in the Ostland was initiated, as shown
above, by Hitler’s decision in September 1941 that Reich Jews were to be
deported as a reprisal measure, meaning that their lives were in severe peril.
There is compelling evidence that the deaths of some German Jews deported to RK
Ostland were decided before the formal Hitler decision to kill all Europe’s
Jews was communicated to the German hierarchy in December.[167] The
decision was made whilst Lohse was visiting Berlin for two weeks commencing in
on October 25. It can be inferred from the fact that, on October 27, Lange told
Lohse that “essential work” on the camps had not yet commenced and that other
arrangements could be made if the camps were not ready (other arrangements
being code for shooting or for the gassing device in Wetzel’s draft of October
25).[168] This
can be inferred from the fact that Lange’s letter of November 8, which
announced the deportations of 25,000 Jews each to Riga and Minsk, revealed that
five transports may be sent to Kaunas. Lange and Lohse would have known that
Kaunas had a killing site (Fort IX) but no camps for holding the Jews. The
resultant killings were recorded in the Jäger Report:

Operational Situation Report USSR No. 151 linked these killings to
an Aktion carried out by Jeckeln in Riga on November 30:

The first three transports that were to come
to Riga were sent to Kaunas. The Riga camp that is to admit about 25,000 Jews
is being built and will be completed very soon.In the meantime, the Higher SS Police in
Riga, SS-Obergruppenführer Jeckeln started a [mass] shooting action on Sunday,
November 30, 1941. He removed about 4,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto and from an
evacuation transport of Jews from Germany. The action was originally intended
to be carried out with the forces of the Higher SS and Police Chief; however,
after a few hours, 20 men of EK 2 who were sent there for security purposes
were also employed in the shooting.[170]

The killings were
organized at local level in a meeting between Peter Kleist and Jäger on
November 22. Kleist’s notebook provides confirmation of the meeting and some of
the killings. The entry for December 1 states that Lohse was present at the
previous day’s massacre of German and Latvian Jews in Riga. Lohse voluntarily
admitted that he had been present at the massacre when interrogated by West
German authorities on April 19, 1950. The Riga massacre was also noted by Bernhard
Lösener on December 19, 1941.[171]
Himmler had belatedly attempted to avert this massacre by issuing a “keine
Liquidierung” order, possibly because executions had only been authorized
explicitly for Kaunas, or because local protests against prior killings had
prompted Berlin to urge a pause.[172] In
either case, the wording “keine Liquidierung” clearly expresses an exception
being made that acknowledges that liquidations were taking place elsewhere.

We can infer three reasons why Lohse insisted that the
Reich Jews be killed. Firstly, the reception camps in Riga that had been
promised for these Jews were not ready. Secondly, Lohse and his colleagues
believed the camps should have been set up further east. Thirdly, Army Group Centre
was likely to oppose the deportations, and this is precisely what transpired in
the case of the 25,000 scheduled to be deported to Minsk. On November 20, at
the instigation of von Greiffenberg, the Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Ostland (Walter
Braemer) complained that “The influx of German Jews, far superior in
intelligence to the bulk of the Belorussian population constitutes a severe
danger for the pacification of White Ruthenia, the Jewish population of which
is made up of Bolsheviks capable of any hostile, anti-German stance.”[173]

As a result of these protests, deportations from the old
Reich to Minsk ceased on November 28, and only 7,000 of the 25,000 Jews were
transported. This incident demonstrates, in miniature, why the Wehrmacht would
never have consented to the resettlement of Jews in the USSR.

Minsk’s leading administrator, Kube, sent a letter to
Lohse on December 16, 1941, noting that the Reich Jews would die of cold in
Minsk, and requesting that Lohse order their killing by a more humane method.[174] Kube
made a further veiled request on February 6, 1942, when he noted that "because
the ground in White Russia is frozen down to a depth of two meters, other
possibilities were also not available".[175] This echoed the note, cited above, made by
Hofmann a week earlier, stating that “the ground is too frozen to
dig pits which would then be available as mass graves for the Jews” but that “in
the spring large-scale executions would be initiated again.”[176]

In April and May 1942, Hofmann’s prediction was
fulfilled: extermination was resumed both of Soviet Jews and of deported Jews
in the Ostland. From May 6 to October 5, 1942, seventeen transports departed
from the Reich to GK White Ruthenia, carrying a minimum of 16,395 Jews. From August
15 to October 26, 1942, seven transports went from the Reich to the Baltic
region, carrying a minimum of 6,601 Jews.[177] These
transports would mostly have been routed across the Germany-Lithuania border,
as this route had been documented for the Düsseldorf-Riga transport of December
12, 1941, by Salitter:

At 12.10 hours the train left Konitz. The
journey then continued via Dirschau, Marienburg, Elbing to Koenigsberg Pr. At
1.50 hours it went onto Tilsit. At 5.15 hours the frontier –station of
Laugszargen and 15 minutes later, the Lithuanian station of Tauroggen were
reached.[178]

The political situation in
Minsk had been tense. Planning as of March 1942 was a
subject of hostility between Kube and Strauch. On July 25, 1943, Strauch wrote
a report to von dem Bach that described this period, complaining that “the
Gauleiter used his knowledge to save his Jews.”[179]
However, Kube’s intervention was not motivated by a desire
to permanently save these doomed Jews, but by a wish to give them a more
‘humane’ or ‘dignified’ death. Kube’s resistance may have been one of the
factors that led Heydrich to visit Minsk in April 1942.[180] The visit was followed soon after by the beginning of
deportations from Austria, Germany and the Protectorate to GK White Ruthenia,
to the killing site at Maly Trostinets. These consisted of at least seventeen
transports departing between May and October 1942.[181] A further transport was diverted to Baranovichi and liquidated on July 31, 1942.[182]

Heydrich’s visit also coincided with
a new wave of killings in other parts of the GK. Thus Kube reported on July 31,
1942 that “we have liquidated about 55,000 Jews in Byelorussia in the past 10
weeks,” including the “Jews incapable of work, who were sent to Minsk in
November of last year by order of the Führer, mainly from Vienna, Bruenn, Bremen
and Berlin.”[183] The Aktion was described even more explicitly
in an Activity Report on August 3, 1942: “Between July 25 and 27, new trenches
were dug. During the Grossaktion on July 28 in the Russian section, 6,000 Jews
are taken to the pit. On July 29, 3,000 German Jews are brought to the pit.”[184] On May
17, 1942, the same author had written that “On May 11 a transport of Jews
(1,000 head) from Vienna arrived in Minsk and were moved immediately from the
station to the trench” and that “For this reason the platoon was deployed right
by the pit.”[185]
In court testimony given in Koblenz on October 30, 1962, defendant Karl
Dalheimer admitted that in 1942 he had stood at the edge of an open grave in
Minsk and shot Reich Jews in the back of the neck.[186] The
killing of many of these deported Jews was done in gas vans. This was made
clear in a telex of June 15, 1942:

A transport of Jews, which is to be
subjected to special treatment, arrives weekly at the office of the commandant
of the Security Police and Security Service of White Ruthenia.The three S-vans there are not sufficient
for that purpose. I request assignment of another S-van (five tons). At the
same time, I request the shipment of twenty gas hoses for the three S-vans on
hand (two Diamond, one Saurer), because the ones on hand are already leaky.[187]

August Becker, a gas van specialist who liaised in the
Ostland, testified on March 26, 1960, to having witnessed killings in Minsk:

In
Riga I learned from Standartenführer Potzelt, Deputy Commander of the Security Police
and SD in Riga, that the Einsatzkommando operating in Minsk needed some
additional gas-vans as it could not manage with the three existing vans it had.
At the same time I also learned from Potzelt that there was a
Jewish-extermination camp in Minsk. I flew to Minsk by helicopter, correction,
in a Fieseler Storch [light aircraft] belonging to the Einsatzgruppe.
Travelling with me was Hauptsturmführer Rühl, the head of the extermination
camp at Minsk, with whom I had discussed business in Riga. During the journey
Rühl proposed to me that I provide additional vans since they could not keep up
with the exterminations. As I was not responsible for the ordering of gas-vans
I suggested Rühl approach Rauff's office. When I saw what was going on in Minsk
— that people of both sexes were being exterminated in their masses, that was
it — I could not take any more and three days later, it must have been
September 1942, I travelled back by lorry via Warsaw to Berlin. I had intended
to report to Rauff at his office in Berlin. However, he was not there. Instead
I was received by his deputy, Pradel, who had meantime been promoted to Major.
... In a private conversation lasting about an hour I described to Pradel the
working method of the gas-vans and voiced criticism about the fact that the
offenders had not been gassed but had been suffocated because the operators had
set the engine incorrectly. I told him that people had vomited and defecated.
Pradel listened to me without saying a word. At the end of our interview he
simply told me to write a detailed report on the matter. Finally he told me to
go to the cashier's office to settle up the expenses I had incurred during my
trip.[188]

A
driver of one such gas van, Josef Wendl, testified in Austria in October 1970
that he was loaned by EK 8 in Mogilev (where he had gassed prisoners) to KdS
Minsk, and gassed a trainload of Austrian Jews at Maly Trostinets on September
14, 1942:

I heard also
that Jews from the Reich were coming and would be gassed...Resistance would
have been useless, so I didn't offer any. I loaded these people in and drove to
the pit. I had seen that the van was nearly full, that about fifty people were
inside...The van ran on idle while gassing. It really should have been run with
the choke, so that the gas mixture would be richer, and the people inside would
die more quickly. But the choke didn't work in my van. I then drove
back...[and] received orders to bring all the luggage to Trostinets. On the day
I was on assignment there, 600 people were gassed.[189]

In
addition to gassing, the Germans continued to shoot thousands of Jews. Strauch
had referred to ‘resettlement’, ‘evacuation’ and ‘pits’ in his Einsatzbefehl of February 5, 1943, for
the extermination of Jews in Slutsk:

On 8 and 9 February 1943 there will be a
resettlement in the town Slutsk by the local command…The
evacuation of the Jews to the resettlement place happens by means of 6 trucks,
each to be accompanied by 4 Latvians…At each pit a group of 10 leaders
and men will work, to be relieved every 2 hours. Times 8-10 o'clock, 10-12
o'clock, 12-14 o'clock, 14-16 o'clock…

The document continued
with a reference to the giving out of cartridges.[190]

In summary, therefore, localized killing in Chelmno,
Serbia and Minsk had helped bring gassing technology to the center of the Final
Solution through the use of gas vans. The demands of local officials to
eradicate Jews had brought fresh momentum to the quest for killing solutions
which then fed into the radicalization of the Europe-wide Final Solution using
gassing technologies.

Mattogno’s response to this mass of evidence is to ignore
most of it whilst systematically distorting the rest. For example, he
quotes Kube’s
letter to Lohse of February 6, 1942[191], but omits the key passage
stating that “because the ground in White Russia is frozen down to a
depth of two meters, other possibilities were also not available.”[192]

Thomas Kues, meanwhile, makes a
risible attempt to deny the reality of policy in Serbia[193]. Kues
claims that “Due
to the significant involvement of Jews in the very active Serbian partisan
movement, a large number of Serbian Jews were killed as hostages”, but this is
clearly refuted by Turner’s admission to Hildebrandt that “it
is wrong, if taken literally, that for murdered Germans, for whom the ratio of
1:100 should come at the expense of the Serbs, 100 Jews will now be shot, but
they are the ones we happened to have in the camp ...” Kues then claims that “a large number of Serbian
Jews were shot, not primarily because of their ethnicity, but because of reasons
of military security, and this as a last resort”, but this is also false
because Turner had written that “the Jewish question solves itself
most quickly in this way” as partially explaining motive. Kues contradicts
himself by claiming that the Jews were shot “as a last resort” but then
claiming that Jewish women and children were “deported east”, thus failing to
explain why the men could not also have been deported. Moreover, Kues’
admission that a request by Ribbentrop to Himmler on October 2, 1941, to deport
the Jews was rejected contradicts Mattogno’s thesis in Sobibor that a
resettlement policy was agreed in September.

Most ludicrously of all, Kues
insists that Rademacher’s report of October 25, 1941, specifying the evacuation
of women and children disproves Turner’s letter of April 11, 1942, thereby
ignoring the subsequent radicalization of policy after that date and the fact
that Rademacher received a letter from Wurm dated October 23, 1941, that “many of the Jewish vermin
will be exterminated through special measures.” This indicates that the women
and children would have died in the East after deportation, and that the policy
change after October was simply to send the gas van to Serbia instead. The
methodological absurdity of using a document from October 1941 to refute a
policy that specifically applied to April 1942 exposes Kues’ mendacity. Moreover,
Kues’ quotation from Rademacher’s report omits the crucial preceding phrase,
“As soon as the technical possibility exists within the scope of the total
solution of the Jewish question”, which hints at the experiments with killing
methods that were noted by Wurm and Wetzel three and five days later.

[142] The term “decimation ghetto” was repeated by Ribbe on 9.10.41 to
justify the ghetto’s inability to loan Jewish labour to other projects.
Browning, Origins, p.392, citing Ribbe Aktennotizen of meetings on
9.10.41 and 16.10.41, YVA, JM 800.

[153]The graves
were exhumed after the war and the leader of the action, Ferdinand Goehler, was
given a life sentence by a court in Stuttgart. Browning,
Origins, 2004, p.542 n.144, citing JuNSV, Bd. VII, Nr. 231b, pp.217-33,
Urteil LG Stuttgart 3 Ks 31/49.

[157] Five other gas van documents
involving Rauff are cited in Mathias Beer, ‘Die
Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden,’ Vierteljahreshefte fuer
Zeitgeschichte, 37/3, pp.403-417. These are: Rauff an der KTI
[Kriminaltechnisches Institut], 26.3.1942. Copy in ZSL, Folder: Verschiedenes
Nr.227; Schäfer an Rauff, 9.6.1942, 501-PS; Truehe an Rauff, 15.6.1942, 501-PS;
Becker an Rauff, 16.5.1942, 501-PS; letter by Firma Gaubschat
[Company/manufacturer] to the Referat [sub-department] IID 3a of the
RSHA [Rauff], 14.5.1942, ZSL, USA Dok. Film I, Bl.28. Beer cites Rauff’s
admission, given as a free man in Santiago in 1972, that "I think, it is
impossible that Pradel undertook the development of the gas- vans on his own.
He must have had an order either by me or someone with a higher position.” The
deposition is on-line; English translation by Roberto Muehlenkamp: http://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/r/rauff.walter/Rauff-deposition-translation
(StA Hamburg, Az. 147 Js 31/67; ZSL, Az.II 415 AR-Z 1310/63-E32, Bl.545). Rauff
had no fear of extradition because West Germany’s extradition request was
denied by the Chilean Supreme Court in 1963.

[163]Carlo
Mattogno, Raul Hilberg e i «centri di sterminio»
nazionalsocialisti’, AAARGH, 2008, p.79, cites this
document but follows Weckert’s
example by ignoring the meaning of the inverted commas and taking the term Entlausungswagen
literally. Mattogno does not explain why a delousing van would be required to
‘clear out a camp’ nor does he confront the last sentence concerning ‘no longer
existing kinfolk’.